Fr. Carmen Mele, O.P.: Today's Homilette

About Me

Bilingual Roman Catholic priest of the Southern Dominican Province. The "homilettes" on this website are completely the work of Fr. Mele. He may be contacted at cmeleop@yahoo.com.
Telephone: (415) 279-9234.

Friday
of the Fifth Week of Easter

(Acts 15:22-31; John 15:12-17)

An old song said, “Love makes the world go round.”A high school teacher challenged this idea.He told his students that love does not make
the world go round.Rather, he said,
money does.He was referring to the idea
that money motivates most people to work which, in a way, sets the world in
motion.An astrophysicist would give
another answer.She would claim that the
earth spins on its axis because of the way it was formed.The swirling gases and dust from which the
earth was formed started the rotation which has never ceased.

With today’s gospel in mind we might ask ourselves, what does love do
then after all?Love puts us in harmony
with God.Since God’s very being is
love, we share God’s life when we love others.There is the difficulty of how to identify true love.St. Augustine can help us here.He once preached, “What does love look like?
It has hands to help others.It has feet
to hasten to the poor and needy.It has
eyes to see misery and want.It has ears
to hear the sighs and sorrows of men and women.That is what love looks like.”

As we all know, it is easy to talk about love but quite another
thing to live.The novelist Dostoyevsky
wrote that love in action is “a harsh and dreadful thing.”It requires sacrifices that we would be loath
to make except for the good of the beloved.For God, the greatest good, we should be ready to make great sacrifices.

Humans today, as in any age, desire pleasure.They crave the satisfaction of their senses from
sex, food, or drugs.Pleasure is not
necessarily bad, but there is something much better.Joy brings more beneficial satisfaction.Pleasure is an agreeable sensation which passes
quickly and must be renewed.Joy, which
comes from having done something well, fills the soul for a long time. Pleasure is opposed to pain; they cannot
coexist at the same time.Joy is often
accompanied by suffering in the quest to do something well.Parents may take some pleasure in the
vacation in Honolulu which their children gave them for their anniversary.But they will feel joy after raising their
children to be loving, honest, and hardworking human beings.In today’s gospel Jesus teaches his disciples
how to find joy.

He says that joy is the fruit of love.When the disciples love one another like he
has loved them, their spirits will be filled with joy.When they lend a helping hand in time of need
or a shoulder to cry on in distress, they will feel the joy of love.All of God’s commandments are oriented to
bring joy to those who keep them.

As we grow older, we should come to the realization that
joy is what makes life worth living.Experience teaches that more than forever eating tasty foods or exploring
picturesque beaches, we become truly satisfied when we have given of ourselves
in loving others.

Thomas Aquinas thought of virtue in a way that might
surprise many.He saw it as a good
quality of the mind that disposes humans to live righteously.So far, no surprises.But Thomas went on that no one can make bad use
of a virtue.This idea is
provocative.“Cannot a terrorist show courage
in a holy war” someone might ask, “so how can it be said that no one can make bad
use of it?”Thomas accepted the
Christian tradition that true virtue is infused by God when the person
surrenders to God in love.It is a gift
which no one can use badly because it comes from God and remains related to Him
as a gift of his love.The beginnings of
virtue may be sown when God enters the soul at Baptism.In any case no one can make bad use of a gift
that keeps her in a relationship with God.The same idea can be found in today’s gospel.

Jesus exhorts his disciples to remain in him as he
remains in them.Both he and the Father
will come to them with the Holy Spirit.The presence of all three will guide the disciple’s actions to always
act in ways that conform to divine love.In this way their actions cannot be anything but good.Jesus uses the illustrative image of a vine
and its branches to describe how virtue is transformed into benefits for
others.He says that the Father will act
like a gardener pruning the vines’ branch.Just as the pruned branches yield a greater harvest so life attentive to
the Father’s commands will result in many blessings.

Our responsibility is to remain in Jesus by following his
(and the Father’s) law of love.We are
to go beyond the Golden Rule.Jesus
tells us to love others as he has loved us.We are to make sacrifices for the good of others as Jesus died to free
us from sin.

What is this peace of Christ that is unlike any other?One biblical expert sees it as “being freed
from sin and united to God."Perhaps it
is the same composure that drives Paul onward to preach the Good News despite just
being stoned almost to death.Paul does
not harbor great resentment toward the Jews.In fact, he maintains a great love for them.He writes later, “For I could wish that I
myself were accursed and separated from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my
kin according to the flesh” (Romans 9:3).

The same peace is found among the families of the twenty-one
Coptic Egyptians whom ISIS martyred four years ago.The families proudly wear t-shirts with pictures
of their beloved in martyrs’ array – white robes and crowns superimposed on
their heads.The author of an article on
the martyrs has written provocative comments about the village where sixteen of the
martyrs lived.He says: “All the houses I visited shared one common
feature: The household was not in mourning. Condolences and expressions of
sympathy seemed out of place. They struck me as somehow elevated to another
plane.”

We are not likely to feel Christ’s peace because our
faith wavers.We wonder if the legacy
which the apostles have handed down is true.We feel the cravings of sex and pride that our times offer.To feel that peace we must do as Jesus
preached from the beginning: “’Repent and believe…’”

The first reading sounds more like a situation comedy
than an episode of true history.Sometimes,
however, reality is stranger than fiction.In any case, people have an odd penchant of adulating men and women as
if they were gods and goddesses.Today athletes
and entertainers have godlike status in the eyes of the public.A Tom Brady or a Nicole Kidman command immense
salaries and attention to the banalities of their lives.

In the biblical passage Paul and Barnabas are worshipped
as gods after facilitating an instant healing.The two apostles take advantage of the opportunity to explain God’s love
for them.They tell the pagan
townspeople that such a mighty deed is but an extension of the care God shows in
creation.Still like many today the
people in the reading refuse to abandon their fantasies.They continue to prepare sacrifices for the apostles.

Unfortunately the attention paid to athletes and entertainers
often detracts from worship of the true God.We know of people who do not go to church on Sunday in order to watch a
football game.Many as well accept the
caprices of entertainers as norms for everyone.The situation leaves us with a double responsibility.We must be careful not to fall into these
vices.And we must instruct our youth that
the living God demands righteous living.